• 🍪 Blender Basics Explore Library Guided Playlists Live Streams Articles Podcast Downloads Collabs Educators: Blender Teaching Guide What's Coming Soon Upgrade your membership
  • Questions & Answers Student Gallery Discord Channel YouTube Channel Citizen Membership Perks ✨
  • Kent Trammell Jonathan Lampel Wayne Dixon Paul Caggegi
    • Full Library
    b

    Cycles Render is all Black

    bennyboyw
    posted to: Create Materials and Shaders for a Scene

    Hi @jlampel

    I have broken my submission horrifically just at the point I was going to submit it. All my cycles renders are now black . I checked the lights are on and they seem to be. I put a sun inside the room and it's still black. The render times are also massive even on 1 sample in viewport. 

    Any ideas what I might have done wrong ?  I'd rather not lose what I've done. I could go through every object appending materials to a fresh copy of the file but that seems like overkill for what is probably a really stupid mistake. 

    Thanks in advance for the help.

    Ben

    Reply
    • b
      bennyboyw replied
      Slight update - I worked out that I had made a mistake with the texture on the lamp bulb. That gave some visual results but the sun is still not working and render times are still appalling. This is not something I have seen previously in any other Blender projects I have undertaken.
    • b
      bennyboyw replied

      Update number 2 - The long render times appear to be caused by the array modifiers on the notebook page objects. 

      Neither the sun object nor the lamp bulb are giving me any real light though.

      I'm learning a lot while unpicking all this !  

    • b
      bennyboyw replied

      And my mystery is now completely solved !  I had a displacement modifier on the chair cushions which for some reason was inflating the cushions so much that they blotted out all known light. I have never seen this happen before and the cushions looked just fine in Matcap view and Eevee. Anyway - I killed the displacement and problem solved. 

      And the horrific render was due to me adding a material to the notebook paper, which had an array modifier on it. The material was used twice on objects with array modifiers, each which had 75 iterations to the array. 

      Man I learned a lot today !  Delete this topic if you need to but I think it may assist other people who might see similar problems.

    • Mark Smith(me1958424) replied

      sounds like quite the adventure...

      just as you said you learned a lot, the topic should remain open in case someone else runs into such things...

      great that you got it all sorted out

    • Jonathan Lampel replied

      Nice work solving the problem before I even saw it! If I had a dollar for every time I've caused something totally strange like this by accident without knowing what was going on, I could probably buy a boat. The key is to keep trying things to narrow down the source of the problem just like you did. Keep up the good work!